A second child has now died of measles in an outbreak that has seen hundreds of people infected across Texas and in bordering states.
The girl, who was just eight years old, lost her life at a Lubbock hospital as a result of “measles pulmonary failure” Thursday morning, The New York Times reported Saturday. It is not clear whether the child was vaccinated or not.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not yet commented publicly on the girl’s death but will attend her funeral on Sunday, according to NBC.
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She is the second child to have died in more than a decade from the otherwise highly preventable disease.
The Daily Beast has reached out to HHS for comment.
As of January, almost 550 cases of measles have been recorded across Texas and in the border areas of the Neighboring states of New Mexico and Oklahoma. At least 56 of these have resulted in hospitalizations.
A third adult who was unvaccinated against the virus died in New Mexico earlier in March after testing positive, though medical officials were unable to determine if measles was the cause of death.
The latest reports put further pressure on Kennedy—a committed vaccine skeptic who has repeatedly touted untested treatments for the virus—over his handling of the spiralling outbreak.
It was only at the beginning of last month that he publicly stated the outbreak was indeed “serious,” having previously described it as “not unusual”—despite the United States not having recorded any measles deaths since 2015.
“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” he wrote in a recent opinion piece for Fox News.
Medical experts have repeatedly taken aim at Kennedy for endorsing alternative treatment for measles, arguing that he has encouraged public aversion to vaccines that are proven to prevent disease while dissuading infected patients from seeking appropriate medical care.
“Mentions of cod liver oil and vitamins [are] just distracting people away from what the single message should be, which is to increase the vaccination rate,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious diseases specialist at John Hopkins University, told NPR earlier in March.
With public officials anticipating that the outbreak may continue for another year, concerns mount that the U.S. may soon lose its “measles elimination status,” which it has maintained since 2000.
“We have really opened the door for this virus to come back,” former CDC Director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden told the New York Times on Saturday.
